I live nestled in downtown Woodinville, just a walk away from the movie theater and TCBY. Here in the apartment building, children run helter-skelter in the parking lot every afternoon, playing soccer or tag. They don't necessarily annoy me, but my dog ends up barking at them.
Sometimes, as a younger teen, I look to the children and see faces perhaps just one year younger than I, or the same age. I can see them from my window on the ground floor, and they can't see me. It's almost as if I am transparent or invisible behind the window, watching life unfold around me. In fact, I'm finding it sort of interesting to observe what the others are doing. Could it be just a writerly thing? Upstairs, much stomping, banging, screaming, and bass can be heard throughout the day and night. After a little observation, I found the apartment to house a family with small children, thus explaining much of the stomping and screaming.
After growing up in the suburbs for most of my life, being in the apartment on the weekends is invigorating. It wakes up a part of my awareness that wouldn't have been alive otherwise. All my life, I was taught that people were quiet and kept to themselves, that the kids playing with one another were only found in movies. On our culdesac, even though it was full of children, each family didn't interact much with the others, having their children do their own things. This, however, didn't lead to much bad - we all rode our bikes around the sewer cover, and I shot arrows and BB pellets in the backyard. However, knowing what "realer" life was through my time here shows what things truly are like.
A small dream of mine is to interact and play with the children myself. Inside of me, there is a small child who still wants to get out and play. I feel as if I'm still too soft for it, though. As a teenager, I'd call it "awkwarded-out". Simply, what do I do with a bunch of children? I don't know any of them or their families. Plus, I tend to keep to myself on the ground story, blogging and writing most of the day. That and the fact that my Spanish is new and very little. Many of this building's occupants are Hispanics and other Spanish-speaking cultures. My dad speaks Spanish, as he was once a professor of the language, but none of us are Hispanic. I aim to learn to speak Spanish and be able to interact with so much more of my world.
I know people - and I see these people every day, at times - who are scared or too proud to interact with the Hispanic population of our city. It sickens me, this pompous pride. Where I go to school, racial variety is very little, and I have been discriminated against for looking Hispanic. I'm Asian, which leads to more. Every day, I hear jokes tossed around degrading Hispanics, and I've seen them to be genuine, nice people through my screen door. I hear people around me say that Hispanic children are stupid when they live in such a beautiful city that houses much of the wealthier population of the east side. These children are just being who they are, and my peers would shut them out of their streams of consciousness in an instant. Why teenagers and children will turn their backs to what's only real is the part that sickens me. I can't say, "Please change!" as much as I'm apt to punch someone in the face one of these days.
Then, there's the fact that I'm young. My peers are young. Their peers are young, and they all think the same of other races. They think less of city children, of country children, of anybody but themselves, and they'll deny it every day. Frankly, I don't know what I'm thinking. By paying attention to this issue, am I denying mental separation? It's a problem that simply will not subside, no matter what we do about it. There will be no change. Since people have categorized each other, they have started a problem that cannot be stopped.
Whether it's for the greater ("They are pointing guns at people, thus, they are dangerous."), mere observation (This little girl has very small clothes, looks malnourished, and lives in a poor place where education is limited. She may not know how to read."), or for the worse ("He is wearing a hood and hasn't talked to anybody. He will kill someone in the next ten minutes if I don't intervene.), this problem won't subside. Ever.
The lack of having a grip on "realer" life is going to be tough. In none of these ten months of living here on the weekends, I have found no neighborly connections, and for that I feel some shame. If the children play with one another like they do in the movies, then shouldn't the neighbors know one another?
What defines this realer life, anyways?
